By Kerri Pepoy,Staff Writer

PARIS – As Principal Ted Moccia walks the halls of Oxford Hills Comprehensive High School, it’s obvious that students look up to him.

“Hey, Moccia!” they call out when they see him. He slaps hands with some of them.

“You get my Christmas present yet?” he asks one student whom he bumped into a few days earlier at a shopping mall.

The gregarious man with a huge smile and a hardy laugh is in his element. “We have great kids,” he said in a recent interview. “This is where I want to be.”

But life wasn’t always nearly as smooth for Moccia, whose formative years were marred by his parents’ divorce and a struggle to make ends meet. He is disarmingly forthcoming about that period of his life.

Born in Jersey City, N.J., Moccia lived in what he described as a rough neighborhood. “We lived right in the center of the city,” he said, recalling a bunker-type house near his home that was occupied by members of the Black Panther Party, a black activist group with militant policies that grew out of the civil rights movement of the 1960s.

“I remember they had sandbags in the windows.”

His parents divorced after a turbulent marriage. After he finished third grade, Moccia’s mother took him and his two siblings to Maine, where she was had been born. They settled in Rockland, and his mother, a registered nurse, took a job at a nursing home, a huge drop in pay from her salary at a large hospital in New Jersey.

“My mom was glad to get us out of that,” he said, referring to his former neighborhood. “But it was a tremendous pay cut. We were on state assistance. We were struggling, for sure.”

Had it not been for his mother and sports, his life may have turned out quite differently, he said. It was a mother’s love and the playing field that molded a boy into a man.

His mother encouraged him to get involved in sports, and he began playing baseball, basketball, and his most-loved game, football. On the playing field, he learned about character, integrity and showing dignity whether you win or lose.

“It was in sports where I found male role models in my life,” he said. “My coaches taught me a lot about life.”

His mother and his high-school football coach are his two personal heroes, and he has strived to emulate them both in his life. “My mother just sacrificed so much so we could have things,” he said. “My high-school football coach was a man of character. You could always trust that what he said, he was going to do.”

As a high-school principal, Moccia tries to instill the same lessons in his students. “If I give a kid my word, and he or she can’t count on it, what good am I doing?” he said. “If I don’t model what I expect, what lessons am I teaching?”

Moccia lives in Norway with his wife Susan, his 19-year-old son Justin, his 18-year-old daughter Kattrena, a cat, and a Labrador retriever in a 116-year-old house. He always has an indoor project, while his wife tends to the gardening. “We’re in a constant remodeling phase,” he said, adding that he just finished redoing the kitchen.

He loves to golf. It allows him to be with friends, even if his skill for the sport needs some refinement. “I’m not very good at it,” he said.

Moccia became principal of the high school this past summer after serving as assistant principal since January 1999. He also taught physical education, coached basketball and track and field, and served as the head football coach.

Formerly a coach and teacher in the Lewiston school system, he moved to the Oxford Hills after being turned down for a job in Lewiston. But the decision turned out to be a blessing, he said, because after moving, he and his wife, who were on a waiting list to adopt, were contacted by the state. Two toddlers in foster care, Justin and Kattrena, were ready to be taken home.

“I truly believe that things don’t happen randomly,” he said.